Feasibility Assessment of a Cost-Effective Two-Wheel Kian-I Mobile Robot for Autonomous Navigation
This work provides a cost-effective mobile robot platform and control architecture for educational and experimental purposes in mobile robotics, primarily for researchers and students.
This research designs and prototypes a two-wheeled mobile robot, Kian-I, comparable to Khepera-IV. It develops a motion control architecture, combining a B-spline and PSO-based path recommender with a trajectory tracking controller, enabling the robot to navigate autonomously from an arbitrary initial pose to a target. Experimental results confirm its functional capabilities for laboratory use.
A two-wheeled mobile robot, namely Kian-I, is designed and prototyped in this research. The Kian-I is comparable with Khepera-IV in terms of dimensional specifications, mounted sensors, and performance capabilities and can be used for educational purposes and cost-effective experimental tests. A motion control architecture is designed for Kian-I in this study to facilitate accurate navigation for the robot in an immersive environment. The implemented control structure consists of two main components of the path recommender system and trajectory tracking controller. Given partial knowledge about the operation field, the path recommender system adopts B-spline curves and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to determine a collision-free path curve with translational velocity constraint. The provided optimal reference path feeds into the trajectory tracking controller enabling Kian-I to navigate autonomously in the operating field. The trajectory tracking module eliminate the error between the desired path and the followed trajectory through controlling the wheels' velocity. To assess the feasibility of the proposed control architecture, the performance of Kian-I robot in autonomous navigation from any arbitrary initial pose to a target of interest is evaluated through numerous simulation and experimental studies. The experimental results demonstrate the functional capacities and performance of the prototyped robot to be used as a benchmark for investigation and verification of various mobile robot algorithms in the laboratory environment.